Mice who drank grapefruit juice gained less weight than mice who drank sweetened water in a study at UC Berkeley.

American Live Wire, Oct 10, 2014

You might want to consider washing it down with a glass of grapefruit juice, the next time you go out for cheese burgers and fries or pepperoni pizza.

Mice who drank their fill of sweetened grapefruit juice gained less weight on a high flat diet than their counterparts who drank sweetened water has been found by the researchers from UC Berkeley in their new study. Better measures of metabolic health including blood sugar levels and insulin sensitivity was found in the juice drinking mice.

The researchers also found that the grapefruit juice did not affect weight gain or loss for mice who were eating a low fat diet. Instead the bodies became more sensitive to insulin. The journal PLOS ONE published the results of the study on Wednesday.

Several caveats were the outcome in the findings. The study was paid for by the California Grapefruit Growers Co.operative for the starters. The study with plenty of skepticism about the dietary power of grapefruits was insisted by the Berkeley researchers from the university’s Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology.

“I was surprised by the findings,” Andreas Stahl, the study’s senior author, said in a statement from the university. “We even re-checked the calibration of our glucose sensors, and we got the same results over and over again.”

The bitter taste of grapefruit juice which comes from a flavonoid called naringin is not cared by the mice. The bitterness caused the mice to lose their appetites and slimmed down when given grapefruit juice instead of water could be the cause for weight loss as per previous study.

The mice who drank grapefruit juice weighed 18.4% less than the mice who drank the sweetened water after eating high fat chow for 100 days. According to the study, the difference in body weight become apparent within 15 days and the gap was large enough to be statistically significant by day 78.

The mice who drank juice were in better metabolic health than the ones who drank the same amount of calories in the form of sugar water at the end of the 100 days. Lower fasting blood sugar levels, better insulin sensitivity and lower levels of triglycerides in their livers were observed in the mice.